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Recent scholarship on trials of Nazi perpetrators has not for the most part included the twelve trials held by U.S. authorities at Nuremberg following the four-power Trial of the Major War Criminals. Notably absent has been an account of United States vs. Otto Ohlendorf et al., also known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which twenty-two SS officers of the mobile squads that killed more than a million Jews in the U.S.S.R. stood trial in 1947 and 1948. Using a broad array of U.S. and German records, including personal papers of many participants, Hilary Earl provides a fine analysis of the trial.
Earl covers a variety of themes, one being the trial's accidental nature. U.S. prosecutors could not stomach another joint trial with the Soviets, but still wanted additional proceedings, each focused on a different facet of Nazism. The Einsatzgruppen Trial was to have been a general SS trial. But the admission of SS-Brigadeführer Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D's initial commander, that he oversaw the killing of 90,000 Jews, together with the discovery of twelve binders of the...